Virtualisation will be a key infrastructure priority for CIOs looking to reduce costs and increase energy efficiency over the next 12 months.

Three-quarters of silicon.com’s 12-strong CIO Jury IT user panel said virtualisation – the simultaneous running of several operating systems on a single desktop or server – is one of their current investment priorities.

Peter Pedersen, CTO at Rank Group, said: “Virtualisation is very much a priority to reduce cost, to increase agility, reduce space requirement and to reduce ‘carbon footprint’ through reduction in power utilisation for both equipment and cooling.”

Reducing the number of physical servers is also saving on management and facility costs for Ben Booth, global CTO at polling and market research group Ipsos.

It’s good for business as we can cut costs, and good for the environment as overall it helps us reduce our carbon footprint.

– Ben Booth, global CTO, Ipsos
He said: “It’s good for business as we can cut costs, and good for the environment as overall it helps us reduce our carbon footprint. Of course, major applications still require multiple servers but for the smaller systems it is proving to be a very effective technology.”

Cost savings and energy efficiency aren’t the only benefits of the virtualisation approach. Paul Hopkins, IT director at Newcastle University, said: “There are lots of different and often complimentary reasons, including capital cost savings, revenue savings, green issues, resilience, performance, and capacity management.”

Graham Yellowley, director of technology services at investment bank Mitsubishi UFJ Securities International, added: “We are looking to leverage virtualisation to maximise our computing efficiency, reduce our data centre space, power and cooling requirements, and to provide an effective disaster recovery facility at a cost lower than purchasing multiple individual machines. Combining multiple grid computing farms and adding virtualisation is also on the agenda.”

Source: Andy McCue